


All You Have to Do Is Sit and Wait

by kalindas



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 05:04:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalindas/pseuds/kalindas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma is actually a witch from the world of Harry Potter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All You Have to Do Is Sit and Wait

**Author's Note:**

> Fictorium beta’ed it for which: have my firstborn if it’s ugly! - but all the mistakes and stupidity are mine. I’d love comments and constructive criticism.

Emma is sent out of the castle for the battle. She’s not of age, and there are no parents who would allow her to stay. The walk to the Hog’s Head is quick, eerily silent – for so many children are never silent. The only sounds are the shuffling of the feet and a quiet ‘oh’ when someone bumps their head on the low ceiling of the passage. When they get to the pub some parents are already waiting to take their children away, and every other moment another couple, wide-eyed and out of breath, appears with a faint pop. Emma’s not sure what’s going to happen to her, there is no one to take her away, so she sits down at one of the tables and peers out of the window, trying to see the starting battle. But everything is dark, and she feels useless. This is not what she imagined war to be like.

At the beginning of her sixth year Hermione Granger comes to give a talk to the school. They’re gathered in the Great Hall, students and teachers, listening to Hermione’s words about healing and progress and opportunity and representation, and Emma thinks that working for the Ministry would be something for her. Hermione says that change is in the air, and that they need all the help they can get to make their world a better place. Emma thinks: one summer left until she can leave the Muggle world behind and become a real witch. 

It happens during winter break of her seventh year. She goes back to the foster home one last time. When she realises she’s pregnant she has trouble remembering the boy’s face. It was nothing serious; he was there, and the Christmas break was long and empty. She can’t tell anyone at school, and there’s no one to tell at home because there is no home. She’s constantly scared that somebody is going to find out and get her expelled. She doesn’t know that it’s something that’s done, but what else are they going to do with an unwed underage pregnant witch?

Her magic goes haywire. Perhaps it’s the hormones, or the worry, but she’s reluctant to try more complex spells. Her grades slip, she spends more time sleeping in the hospital wing than going to classes, and by the time she takes her NEWTs she’s surprised she passed even one.

Summer arrives, the summer she’s been longing for since she found out she was a witch, when she’s finally free and adult and ready to start her life. But her bump is growing, and she decides to give up the baby. There is nothing she can give it, and there is nothing it can give her. She’s never heard of adoption in the wizarding world, save for famous wizards like Harry Potter or Teddy Lupin, passed to godparents seemingly without a second thought. But Emma has never known of any relatives, and this baby won’t either. And so she goes back to the Muggle world. She’s going to have the baby and give him his best chance by giving him up, and then she’ll begin living her life, free.

Later, when she thinks back to the day she unpacked her few things into a tiny room above a pub on the outskirts of London, she thinks that was the day her old life died.

She doesn’t think it’s really going to happen this way, and until the guard clanks the bars shut behind her she can’t imagine she’s going to have her baby in prison. At least she’s not in Azkaban. But she does have her baby. And she gives him away. The adoption is closed, she will never see him again. That’s the way she wants it. But on her first night back in her cell she imagines a beautiful young couple surround the baby, coo at it, try to catch its hands. She likes this fantasy.

She gets out, but the baby stays with her, regardless of the fact that she can’t see him. She knows she wanted it this way, but she finds herself longing for a letter or a photograph, any reminder that he actually was there. She feels like if she did get a glimpse of him, she’ll be able to move on. She wonders how she’s supposed to finally start her life this way. She can’t think of anything better than to move.

It doesn’t help; the baby still haunts her dreams. She moves again, and again, and again, and one day she is 22 years old and tending the bar at a grubby pub in Dublin when it hits her: she’s never going to work alongside Hermione Granger, not unless they start selling fire whiskey at the Ministry canteen. Then she packs her two bags and hops on a plane.

New York City is huge and faceless and so loud. But the loudness of it makes everything inside her head just a little quieter. Everything seems a bit duller. The baby is still there – he’s always there, but now there are days on end when she doesn’t think of him. Her magic diminishes – she almost physically feels its power getting weaker. She hasn’t used it in so long, and maybe you need to hone your skills. She keeps her wand, just in case. She does seem to be really good at finding things, though, and she thinks perhaps it’s some of her magic working. Sometimes she wonders if the baby inherited her powers.

She can’t seem to stay long enough in the same place and moves more times than there are months in a year, so it’s more than a little shocking when her son knocks on her door; maybe her ability to find people is somehow genetic. He isn’t the baby she remembers, and neither does he seem to have any magic in him. He’s smart and nerdy, and very cute. Emma thinks he has her eyes.

His name is Henry, and Henry is okay, mostly. His mother, on the other hand, Emma isn’t so sure. She had spent hours and days and weeks imagining the baby’s family, but someone like Regina never even crossed her mind. The boy is healthy and well cared for, and has everything he could possibly need. She doesn’t doubt Regina’s love for him, but at the same time she is so aloof and defensive, and seems to keep the entire town in a state of inexplicable and permanent fear. Actually, something about this whole town seems completely off.

Emma is not prepared for Henry to die, or to be brought back to life by a kiss. She has spent so long knowing that there is one magical world that hearing Regina admit to another one feels surreal. She had left one only to step right into another one. One where fairy-tales are actually real no less.

When the purple fog envelops her she feels magic curse through her veins, like it did back in Hogwarts when she practiced spells. Her fingers tingle. She touches the wand she’d sewn into the lining of her red leather jacket years ago.

The morning the curse breaks, Emma is reminded of another morning like this. Vividly, as though it were yesterday, she sees herself walking back to the castle at dawn. There was no one to stop her, and she simply walked back to the only home she’d ever known. Past Hagrid’s smoldering hut, past uprooted trees, past barricades of broken gargoyles and smashed up suits of armour.

And bodies.

Somehow it’s not the bodies she remembers, it’s the new, dull, orange-pink dawn looking out from behind the clouds, like nothing ever happened. Nothing ever did, Emma thinks, because she sat in the Hog’s Head and listened to the sounds of the battle, never even trying to join in.

And now, she thinks, she can be useful; this, more than a decade later in a different world can be her Battle. She pushes Whale off, shielding Regina with her own body, hopes against hope that the wand still works and shouts “Protego!”


End file.
